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Ecma Receives 3,522 Comments on Open XML Standards
Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft's Office Open XML document format attracted 3,522 comments from the national standards bodies that participated last summer in balloting that has so far derailed the effort to certify the format as an ISO standard.
Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft and the sole Microsoft employee on the Ecma Technical Committee, revealed the total number of comments that had been received in a blog posting this week. Ecma International is a Swiss standards body that already ratified Open XML and is guiding the format through the ISO.
According to Jones many of the 3,500-plus comments, consisting mainly of objections and suggested changes to Ecma's standards proposal, overlap with one another. "When you group them into similar buckets, it narrows down pretty quickly into a more manageable list," he said. Still, he apparently acknowledged that the number of comments was "still pretty impressive."
Open XML just missed out on a fast-track to approval as an ISO standard in the initial balloting that concluded in early September. Ecma's proposal won a majority of the votes that were cast but not enough to meet the requirements for approval.
Ecma has until January 14 to provide responses and rebuttals to the comments submitted by the national standards bodies. The issues raised will then be debated at a so-called ballot resolution meeting that ISO will hold starting February 25, after which the various national standards bodies will have a chance to amend their vote — the last chance for Open XML to be approved."
And the ECMA modded most of the 3522 comments between +1 and +3 interesting.
3521 were malformed, and the other one was empty.
Perhaps someone can submit it to the Guiness World Records folks? There can't have been too many other standards with as many (or more) comments. It may not end up being a standard, but with a bit of help it can be a really good joke.
"Open XML" is that kind of like "Open VMS"? (The funniest oxymoron there ever was...)
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
That's not fair. They are going to edit it in Office 2007, so the entire layout is going to change.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
"Ecma receives 3,522 Comments on Open XML Satan darts".
:)
There, fixed it for ya.
Taunting Microsoft fanboys on Slashdot, huh?
Next up, taunting neo-cons at a Barbara Streisand concert?
I think he was implying that he wrote all the comments himself. Or maybe it really was a masturbation reference.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
May I ask, what happened to your original /. ID?